Between The Fall and The Find
by Humbuggy
Summary: In the time between pulling Steve (Captain America, his mission, a complication) out of The River and Being Found, Bucky Barnes scrapes himself together; he is a ghost and a person, and it's hard trying to be both at the same time. /Gen Fic, Bucky Centric, Post Winter Solider- Pre(ish) Civil War, mild spoilers/
I wrote this is like an hour after I watched Civil War for the second time. Mild spoilers - not explicit, but spoilery enough - for Civil war.
Some vauge ship allusions in there, bc Stucky is #1 OTP, but it's kinda hand wavey.

Bucky Centric - Pre Civil War (mostly), Post Winter Solider.

FUCKING CIVIL WAR, RESCUE ME FANFICTION

* * *

He scrapes himself together.

There's no other word for it: scrape. He is shards and fractures, pulling himself into a semblance of a person. Not a weapon. Not an Asset. Not one metal arm, a cracked egg of a brain, a hunted thing going to ground.

The first six months after he pulls Captain America (Steve, his mission, a complicated mess inside his head and inside his body) from The River are ones he spends crawling from bolt hole to bolt hole. He is acutely aware of the price on his head, the target on his back, the men trying to find him.

During the day he hides or runs. At night he peels himself out of nightmares and tries to piece memories together into a splintered whole. Sometimes he wakes and doesn't know who Steve is, can't remember the nights he spent shoulder to shoulder in freezing Brooklyn winters with an angular boy whose body is too small for his riotous voice; he can't remember who _he_ is- one those days he is all shell and no self.  
Other times he wakes and the memories crack anew. He lies on the ground, head pressed into the corner between wall and floor as if to ground a body swimming with thought and clamouring with too many facets of being.

He calls himself Bucky, because that was the name that _Steve_ gave him. It is the name that fits him most- it is not _Asset,_ or _Soldat_ , _Soldier, James Buchanan Barnes.  
_ He is a human, but not quite a person. He is a self but not quite a whole – sometimes he can't tell if it's because he has too many parts, and sometimes he can't tell if it's because he has too little.

He survives because he makes rules for himself. Being a ghost is easy, being a man – not so much. It's hard trying to stay one while becoming the other.

He doesn't stay in one place. He doesn't do anything to get noticed. He buys food if he can, steals food if he can't; he will not go hungry again.

He doesn't take chances.

He carries only enough ballast to keep himself _himself_ : a backpack, three journals. More journals follow as he writes down his scattered memories, trying to sort them. They're broken into three parts: after The Fall, before War, during War. Aside from losing his memories, losing his self, he can't say what his other fears are.

He bounces from country to country, crossing boarders illegally and avoiding Hydra where he remembers they used to be.

It's a year after The River before he gets found; by Hydra, not Steve and his friend. Bucky's lucky – the Hydra who find him don't have to words which strip Bucky from himself, make him an empty shell to fulfil orders. Bucky leaves behind a trashed bedsit in the dead of the night, bodies stripped of identifiers and dumped. He leaves the country entirely, only circling back six months later when some false leads pop up saying the Winter Solider is a continent away. (The false lead was a recent army vet with a prosthesis and ptsd, it's eerily similar to himself – in a different time and place, a different universe, that could have been him.)

Little by little he pieces himself together. He counts the days since he last killed someone and feels bizarrely accomplished when it reaches a one-year milestone after the run in with Hydra.

Bucky never stays too long in one place keeps moving, but finds some semblance of living. Libraries are helpful and also quiet, no one bothers him if he is also quiet so he spends a lot of time in them. Sometimes he even picks up a book off the shelf and reads it; the first time he did it, Bucky felt a strange flesh memory of pages turning and bony ankle pressed close to his. He remembers reading back Before The War about aliens and space and swords and dragons. One story that he picks up is about a robot pretending to be human. It makes him feel strange and uneasy in his skin – he doesn't finish it, dumps the book back on the shelf and cuts out of town, only settling again in a different country two weeks later.

He adds this to his list of Safe Things: being up high is Safe, distance from bad things is Safe, being unnoticeable is Safe, libraries are Safe, not reading about robots is Safe, always being aware of things is Safe, staying away from Hydra is Safe, running is Safe, hiding is Safe, fighting in self-defence to run away is Safe.

Steve is not on the list of Safe things because Steve is complicated. Bucky may be dangerous to Steve; he doesn't know if Steve is dangerous to him but he doesn't want to take the chance because not taking chances is Safe. Therefore, staying away from Steve is Safe.  
Keeping Steve Safe is also connected to staying away from Steve. The two are strangely tied together; Protecting Steve is an impulse he can't quite understand, but it is layered into his body at a level so deep it is almost instinctive. Bucky trusts his instincts because he can't trust not much else, not even his self at times.

Sometimes he sees Steve on the tv, sometimes it's good news and sometimes it's bad. When it's bad, the newsreader screws up Steve' title and the death toll piles. The word 'accountability' gets voiced too. It gets worse after Sokovia, but Steve's no longer looking for him, so he and Steve are still Safe. (Steve from Bucky, Bucky from Steve.)

Bucky still keeps to his rules, still keeps moving every other month or so, he stays Safe. By now he can call himself a person – he's not so much a shell, he is Bucky Barnes. He is A Person. He is more than memories and an arm. He still sometimes wakes up with his 'self' lost – but not often. He doesn't trust that he, Bucky, will return from those days of blank non-being, but so far his self always comes back.  
He dreams of blood and war and ice, waking from nightmares stock still and sweating in his sleeping bag. He dreams of Steve and war and Brooklyn; sometimes his memories rise and it's of naked women blurred with angular shoulder blades and broad jaws. His body's reactions to those dreams are always strange, heat stirring in alien places. If he feels Safe, he rolls over and ruts into his flesh hand. If he doesn't, he clenches his jaw and stares up at the ceiling, waiting for his body to subside.

He dreams of Steve, of himself. He Remembers.

By then, it's been a couple of years since The River and the fall of hydra. Bucky's got twelve notebooks of memories in his backpack and it's been two years since he last killed anyone. It feels good, in a strange way. He's been in Bucharest for two months, the longest he's stayed in anyone place yet. He buys plums and coffee when he has the money – pick pocketing it from tourists who are easy marks and don't get him Noticed.

Being Noticed is dangerous and Bucky makes sure that he is definitely _not_ noticed, so he realises straight away when something is wrong. The newspaper says he blew up a building, that he stuck a bomb in a van and killed a king – and Bucky – Bucky doesn't do that anymore. He can count the amount of time since he last killed someone – he _doesn't do that anymore; he won't be anyone's weapon_.

The fear is sudden and striking, plums and ice sticking halfway up his throat.

He would leave then and there, but he doesn't have his backpack – and he _needs his backpack_. If he loses his memories again – he can't lose his memories again. _he can't._

So he goes back to his apartment where his backpack is – except that Steve is there, and now Bucky isn't Safe and neither is Steve, no matter what Bucky does.

But since when has Bucky ever really been Safe?

* * *

 _Fins._

Please come scream over Bucky Barnes with me.


End file.
